Friday, July 11, 2008

Caught in the middle

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/caught-in-the-middle/2008/07/11/1215658130215.html

[Sydney Morning Herald] 11 Jul 2008--Robert Forsyth, the usually chirpy Anglican Bishop of South Sydney, groans down the phone. "You'd be crazy to blame the man personally," he says. "He's wrestling with two unprecedented issues and, while I'm not saying he hasn't contributed to them, they're not of his making."

Forsyth is referring, with a mixture of sympathy and censure, to the plight of Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury.

Williams, a 58-year-old Welsh-born intellectual and shepherd of the world's 77 million Anglicans, is trying to stave off a split in the Anglican Communion by a union of conservative Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals opposed to the consecration of female bishops and the ordination of openly gay and lesbian clergy.

The Anglican General Synod in York this week voted down a Williams-endorsed compromise that would have gone part of the way to accommodating those opposed to women bishops. That prompted dissenters to warn of a mass exodus overseas of Anglican traditionalists seeking ministry from conservative archbishops, and coincided with reports of secret talks between Vatican officials and evangelical bishops exploring a union with Anglo-Catholics, and refuge with Rome, once women are ordained.

Australia is a flashpoint in this tumult.

Despite Forsyth's conciliatory tone, he is a leader in the Sydney diocese, which has agitated, and more recently mobilised, against liberalism in the church.

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